dark humor

An “Act of God” occurs: people are in the way, everybody dies except for the one who conveniently survived to tell the story.

An “Act of God” occurs: people are in the way, but 1 or 2 people “save the day” saving a few of the other people; everyone focuses on how amazing and wonderful it is that some were saved, even though the majority of humanity has suffered a horrible death.

Suspense-Thriller

An “Act of “God” is about to occur: 99.9% of the story is about how people are trying to avoid massive human suffering or the end of the world by creating a man-made miracle; the last .1% of the story makes it clear we’ll never really know what happened.

French Film Version

Four friends sit around a table drinking wine and discuss passionately (for 3 hours) the meaning of suffering and whether or not God exists. One of them wonders if they themselves exist. Every single person in the audience considers this film a life-changing event, all five of them.

True Mystery

God acts: sacrifices Himself to save the world; most people don’t even notice, and the rest of them don’t quite get why or what it really means. The mystery is that a few do.

Boy meets girl: they fall in love, they begin a happy life together, one of them dies.

Boy meets girl: they fall in love, one of them is unfaithful, they wish each other dead.

Boy and girl never meet: they live lives of profound loneliness and wish themselves dead.

Comic

Boy meets girl: they live happily ever after, but mostly because they have no imagination.

Boy meets girl: they live happily together for many years until their children cause them all kinds of headaches.

Epic

Boy meets girl: they fall in love, they get separated somehow and spend the rest of their lives doing incredibly interesting things all in the pursuit of finding each other, only to discover they were seeking themselves, or the meaning of life, or some such grand theme everyone finds immensely interesting even though utterly predictable.

Boy meets girl: they fall in love, but he decides he needs to sacrifice his own happiness (and hers) in order to save the world; they both turn out to be significant trouble-makers for all of society.

Boy meets girl: they fall in love, the world decides they can’t be together, so boy and girl decide to sacrifice the world for the sake of their heroic love which they consider a cosmic connection but is really just addiction to lust.

Salvific

God creates boy and girl: they do all kinds of crap, God forgives them and shows them a better way, because naturally, God realizes it’s all His own fault for having given them free-will but no sufficient self-discipline.

All of the above are really just 2 stories:

Boy meets girl; anything can happen after that, and it’s all somewhat predictable.